Theatre review: The Tempest(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

Shakespeare's Globe's winter season is one they can't really make a profit out of due to the Swanamaker's size, so traditionally it's been the one where less obviously commercial choices are made. In the past this has tended to mean expanding the repertoire to less famous Jacobean playwrights and beyond, but for the 2025/26 season it involves two of the more popular Shakespeare plays getting eccentric reinventions. And unlike Holly Race Roughan's Midsummer Night's Dream, which simply took the common trope of finding the play's dark side to its natural extreme, Tim Crouch's look at The Tempest is grounded in ideas I've seen applied to the play a lot less frequently. It is very recognisably Crouch's work, even without the fact that he also appears in it, because in a theme that runs through a number of his plays it takes place in a theatre - specifically this one.

Prospero (Crouch,) his daughter Miranda (Sophie Steer) and the indigenous inhabitants, human Caliban (Faizal Abdullah) and magical spirit Ariel (Transphobia Ltd Employee Naomi Wirthner,) both of whom Prospero enslaved as soon as he arrived on their island, are here recast as a quartet of storytellers who open the play.

Among the various things I don't much like about The Tempest is the honking great Basil Exposition speech at the start, and one advantage of this approach is that it it significantly breaks this up, sharing Prospero's monologue among all four characters who, for reasons that will become apparent later, recite the events before the play's start with the slightly weary edge of people who know the story a bit too well. (Also becoming apparent later is why Ariel's hopes for freedom are never stated in the singular, but always "we" encompassing the quartet.)

So the former Duke of Milan, Prospero was usurped by his sister Antonia (Amanda Hadingue) and banished with his then-infant daughter, ending up on this island. Using Ariel's magic, he has now caused the shipwreck of Antonia, her collaborator Sebastian (Colin Michael Carmichael,) and the loyal but tedious advisor Gonzalo (Tyrone Huggins.) Also on the ship was Neapolitan king Alonso (Jo Stone-Fewings,) whose son and heir forms a major part of the wider plan Prospero is cooking up for regaining and increasing his power.

The four who start the play as residents of the island may already be on stage but the rest of the cast are hiding in plain sight in the audience, being called up only when their character appears in a scene, and returning to the their seats in between - even if this means repeatedly having to crawl over the real audience members. Among the fun touches this leads to is Antonia and Sebastian sniping from the sidelines like Statler and Waldorf.

Probably gaining the most out of this conceit is Joshua Griffin as Ferdinand: Making him one of the Globe ushers gives an extra dimension to one of Shakespeare's most thanklessly dull romantic leads, as he gets to fuss around cleaning up after the characters, and deal with the tourist using her phone to translate the dialogue, who then becomes Trinculo (Mercè Ribot,) and the drunken latecomer who turns into Stephano (Patricia Rodriguez.) The latter two are both Spanish, and along with Rachana Jadhav's cluttered design that brings to mind items pilfered from across the world, the use of Spanish from them and Malay from Abdullah - and the other characters' dismissive attitude towards their languages - are among the production's nods to the play's colonial themes. (The Spanish duo also means we get a surprise reference to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics in the form of "Amigos Para Siempre.")

As my first Shakespeare outing of 2026 this was a promising one, taking a play I'm no big fan of and giving me one of the most entertaining productions of it I've seen (there were quite a few pre-teens in the audience this afternoon, and from their reaction I'd say this also makes for a very strong introduction to Shakespeare.) The four narrators device means their characters don't really come into definition early on but this does build up over the course of the performance - there's a sense of Crouch and Wirthner as an old married couple, with Ariel the long-suffering wife having to calm down Prospero's sudden bursts of fury, Abdullah increasingly fighting for independence and Steer longing hopelessly for an escape. Because we build to the concept that these four characters are trapped not on an island but in a story that they're doomed to repeat forever, a sad but satisfying tying up of the themes and clues that we've been teased with in the previous hours.

The Tempest by William Shakespeare is booking in repertory until the 12th of April at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.